Ben Clifford Technical Blog: html

Showing posts with label html. Show all posts

28 January, 2012

one line to make your site look nice on iPhone

Well, I came across a magic line of HTML for making a website look basically readable on an iPhone. Not magic in the sense that I don't understand what it does. But magic in the sense that its a single line that is the first big step to making a site look OK.

The line is (to go in your <head> section:
<meta name="viewport" content="width = device-width" />

What it does is make the iPhone web browser render the HTML at a sensible readable font size, with word wrapping at the end of the screen. (the default, otherwise, is to try to fit a regular screen worth of pixels across, then zoom out to make it fit on the small iPhone screen - that means the user has to zoom and pan to do anything).

Now my pages still look like crappy hand written HTML, but at least they're readable on an iPhone now.

I added this to the shellinabox installation I have on barwen.ch, and now its much prettier to use a browser-based shell on an iphone - you get a 30 character terminal thats at sensible font size, rather than a wide wide terminal at unreadable font size.

30 July, 2011

HTML Slidy

HTML Slidy is a neat style sheet for making powerpoint-like presentations that are: i) written in HTML, and ii) appear in a browser. I've used it for one presentation and quite liked it. My presentation was entirely text. I can imagine it being more awkward for graphics-intensive presentations where the automatic reflowing of content to fit the current window turns into a downside rather than an upside.

03 April, 2010

HTML forms in the early 90s

Before HTML forms used the <form> tag, there was a simpler mechanism called <ISINDEX>. I was reminded about this because someone asked why CGI examples showed urls without name=value pairs in the ?query section, like this: http://ive.got.syphil.is/disease-registry.html?pox

I then went to see if <ISINDEX> still worked in modern browsers. I discovered that in
Safari, it renders a box, but there seems to be no way to submit the query (traditionally, pressing enter would submit it). Lynx and w3m still support it.

From others, I hear:

apparently the default browser on the g1 doesn't even recognize isindex as some sort of input field, although it renders it as such.
sort of weird; won't let you type in it but it renders an input box

and Chrome is also reported to work correctly.

Anyway, this post has an isindex tag right here:

<--- there, so you can see how it works in your browser...

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